Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Energy Transfers in Food Chains
...
Biomass contains energy, which
originates from the sun
...


Consider the food chain opposite
...

%)
When the rabbit eats the plant it uses up some of the energy from the
plant and stores the remaining energy in its body
...


At each stage of the food chain energy is being used up to stay alive,
for example, during respiration, which powers all life processes,
including movement
...

This is especially true for birds and mammals that are homeothermic
...

As the energy is lost it means the next animal in the food chain can't use it
...
So much energy is lost at each stage that there is
not enough energy left to support more organisms after 4 or 5 trophic levels
...

Bio$mass is the weight of all the organisms at each level
in a food chain
...
So a pyramid of biomass shows how much
energ there is at each trophíc level
...
This is because most
of the biomass (or energy) is lost, during respiration

Fleas

Qg

movement, heat transfers and droppings, so does
not become biomass at the next level up
...

In the exam they will expect you to give
units (g or kg) for biomass and be able to

draw pyramids of biomassto scale
...

The host gains nothing from having fleas

---